i have an .mpg around 200 megs and i'd like to be able to watch it on the dvd player...do dvd players play mpgs? can i just burn it to disc? do i need to do anything special to the mpg (convert it, i guess)? maybe it needs to be a vcd (of which i know nothing about at this time)?

Different DVD players will play different types of disks. Most will play VCD and/or SVCD, each of which uses MPEG files for the video and audio, but require some preparation before you burn. In many cases you can also fool a DVD player that only plays VCDs into playing an SVCD. A much smaller, but growing number, of players will play miniDVD (DVD files on a CD), which are sometimes a little more complex to make than VCD/SVCD, but can be a useful learning tool if you plan to make DVDs at some point in the future. Most miniDVD compatible players should also have some sort of VCD/SVCD support. Finally, with some players you can just burn the MPEG file to a CD-R, and then play it without any authoring.

You should start by figuring out which formats your player supports. Once you know that, post the information here and somebody can point you in the right direction. You can start with this site, where you can look up what people have reported your DVD player is compatible with:http://www.dvdrhelp.com/dvdplayers.php

This database is built entirely from user submitted data, and can't be considered 100% accurate, but it's very good. Also, in case this was looking too easy, if you have an Apex player it can be a little more complicated because they sometimes sell players with the same model number, but different hardware in them.

i did find a tutorial today that showed me how to de-mux my mpg into separate .m1a and .m1v files, the convert my audio to .aiff and then create a container .mov for the video and audio files...

however, i'm not sure what is next in terms of burning to cdr...

i believe i need some instructions so the player will know what to do with these files...i can either have some additional application (i'm on a mac) put things together or find a set of player instructions to put everything together...

i think i would rather go with the latter method as i'm reading about alot of problems with the audio not working...

anyways...perhaps all of that should just be ignored and somebody should point me in another direction now that i know my player can do both vcd and svcd...

Since you're on a Mac I can't help you much, except to say that you should stay away from .MOV files if you want it to play them in a standalone, if you start with an MPEG-1 file, VCD should be the way to go, but if it's an MPEG-2, stick with SVCD.

vaaska, what is your CD burning software? With Nero (which you can download and use for 30-day trial), you can just use the wizard to select the MPEG and tell it you want to make a VCD or SVCD, and it will create all the directories and files you need as well as burn it for you. Foregt demuxing and that other stuff.